A Cloven Conundrum
by Vinelle
Summary: The anatomically incorrectly titled tale of a deer called Hairy, or Harry, and his questions.
1. Harry's Ponderings

People called him Hairy, but he had from a very early age rejected that. To himself he was always Harry.

(In moments of confidence (hubris) and hope (delusion) he even dared to fancy himself Harry _Dursley_ )

But a name never even spoken would not change anything.

Harry was a deer, a roe deer to be precise, and just like that, the world dismissed him.

Not that he hadn't tried to convince himself he was actually human, that his deer body, even the Dursleys were all part of some elaborate delusion. Why he would do that to himself was beyond him, but he liked this idea, because it offered him the possibility of waking up. Whenever he convinced himself of this he would run headfirst into the wall, step on the firecrackers Dudley left lying around oh-so-surreptitiously on the lawn, anything, anything that might pull him out of his own mind and into what could only be a real life.

So far he had yet to transcend reality, and had only a lot of injuries that would have been the death of him if he lived in the wild to show for his numerous attempts. (The Dursleys were convinced theirs was a particularly stupid deer.)

Like other mammals, he could not recall his own beginning. All he had ever known was the garden behind 4 Privet Drive and the Dursleys. He did, however, know that he had not always been unhappy.

He was not sure when he had become self-aware, no one is, though he had vague recollections of the day he ceased to be happy.

This day was probably the only real recollection he had, not because of its importance, but because this was the only event that ever stood out in his dull life. Even so, he had been very little at the time, so it was more split into flashes and feelings, accompanied by the knowledge of what had happened, than it was a single coherent, detailed memory.

What happened was roughly this: Harry, a bit shorter than Petunia's garden chairs and slightly unsteady, had approached Dudley, who had been knocking two Lego figures together (the slow finesse of sticking them together to create something escaped him. His was a spirit of destruction and _being_ entertained). He wanted to play and be friends. He had known that Dudley had feet instead of hooves, he was not blind, but he was very little and thought this no more an obstacle than gender, or skin colour.

Dudley was not so innocent.

His memories were fussy, he wondered if there hadn't been things being thrown as well, but the boy had at least screamed. That he knew. Loudly. Vernon and Petunia had come running at the racket, and a shocked Harry had been kicked and pushed back behind the house, where Vernon had tied him to the fence.

That day was important because he knew, intrinsically, that before he had assumed his life to be a good and positive thing. After came the dreary existence he had to accept every day ever since. His spirit had been stepped on that day, and it never got back up. It was his Rubicon.

When Vernon at last released him from the fence he did not move. Where would he have gone?

Time had slowed to a crawl. He watched Dudley go from being a kindergartner to a schoolboy, and he watched the Dursleys enter and leave the house, have celebrations and friends over and _live_. His own days were so monotonous, waking up and eating and shitting and rewind, he had not been much older when he realized he was pretty much living the same day over and over. Snow, the edibility of grass and the changing leaves were his only interactions with the passage of time.

His was a bizarre little existence and he suspected it might have been the most meaningless one that had ever been.

(If the sum of a life is determined by its consequences for others, then Harry had no influence over his equation at all, as he held no power over others. He had heard of the butterfly whose wings start a hurricane on the other side of the world, but that only made him feel worse. His was even less than the might of a dying larvae. His own insignificance galled him. _What was the point?)_

This is not to say he was so self-absorbed as to think himself the only one in the world who suffered or lived in monotony. Sheltered though he may be, he knew that humans could be sad too. And yet he could not imagine a thing more wretched than he, for no matter how desolate or pitiful, a human would communicate with others at some point in their lives. Even if they were stillborn, severely brain damaged or tortured everyday in a hole in the ground, their peers would still know they were handling human beings, and so they were acknowledged. Their mothers would know they had born a human.

Harry would never be afforded such a luxury.

This is not to say that he took his uniqueness for granted.

Because if he could be a deer with the mind of a man, how could he know that other animals did not have human minds too? Who was he to say that all living things were not intelligent? If it were so, did that mean they too lived in melancholia and isolation, or were they all content knowing their place in the world and he the lone freak? If yes, how could they not feel lonely when only humans were capable of speech? Or was there some language he did not know?

(Was the world a place of enslaving and eating the barking and meowing screams of the helpless? Petunia swatted flies with clinical precision and Vernon had mousetraps lying around. Were they murderers?)

Might there be a whole world of intelligent animals out there, perhaps even a clandestine civilization? If so, then why was he not part of it? Had he been excluded? Why?

He approached other animals. He trotted over to Mrs Figg's and tried to communicate with her cats. They ignored him. His attempt at trying to socialize with Mr. Webster's dog quicky devolved into them barking at each other and Mrs. Webster running for the camera. He felt ridiculed.

Scratch that, he felt terrified.

There was nothing, nothing whatsoever indicating that other animals were intelligent. He had to assume that he was alone. Which in some ways made him the first man, the modern Adam of a new world. But there was no Eve to tempt him, no God to disobey… _Oh._

Was it God who had created him?

It would explain so much, if not everything.

God created man in his own image, and while mankind presumed this to mean that he too had arms and legs and was human enough to even have a son, Harry realized that they were mistaken. Divinity lay not in their dominance of the world nor their forms, perfect adaptable predators that they were. Those were mere by-products. No, it lay in their souls.

And Harry, for whatever reason, had been granted one too.

Yes, there was the possibility that he had ben bred by scientists. That top secret labs and madmen in white coats had cultivated him on a petri dish like a damn vaccine, that his truest name wasn't Harry or Hairy but Case 395. It was a possibility, in fact a very logical one, but he desperately did not want to be. He was not a thing born of nature and reason. The thought of his struggle, of all the bizarre things about his existence and of his mind, his wonderful but problematic mind all being part of some callous experiment, funded by indifferent bureaucrats or some sick billionaire and of how there in this scenario would be some incongruous _they_ watching his every move, observing him, taking bets on just how smart he was and how he would react to the Dursleys, paid actors, tormenting him… it made the grass in his stomach feel like heavy dirt, like mud, and he was left with the fantastical. He had to be magical.

For wouldn't that make him evidence that some higher power had the savoir-faire to create life? On their own, men could claim that their perfection was their own merit. That scientists had discovered the only truth there was. Harry proved that there was some other factor, something beyond the mundane calling the shots. Somebody had looked at his not yet existing form, and given it life.

He wondered if that had happened in the moment he had been conceived, or if the facts of his life had been weaved into the tapestry of the Universe at the Dawn of Time. If he was fated to exist, or an impulse decision- or an accident. He wondered if it had been a mistake, if there was a child wandering somewhere, in perfect health but as basic as any beast. He wondered if its parents loathed their freak like the Dursleys loathed him.

Or if there was any sentience behind the divine at all. Being a thinking deer was such a bizarre situation, there had to be some greater underlying reason behind the joke that was his existence. He had no way of proving anything, but he wanted there to be a reason for it all.

Or did he?

Assuming that God was indeed real, and had chosen to create him, Harry could be none other than the Chosen One.

(He felt safe in assuming he was the only one. If he wasn't, he would have known, of this he was sure – or else there were others, but they had made nothing of it and remained in obscurity.)

Following that line of thought, Harry contemplated his own significance. This had to change his outlook on life. Right? He could be that which had been sought after since the dawn of Man. He could be the proof of God. If he were to somehow prove his sentience to the rest of the world, like Darwin had proven Man was evolved from apes, there would be a philosophical reckoning. Harry would, without disproving nature and the discoveries that had been made, set a question mark behind near every conclusion man had come to. He would make God impossible to deny.

Or not.

The practical details of his vision put a spoke in his wheels. At the end of the day he was still a deer, and there would be those who would scream blasphemy at the thought of someone like him spreading the word of God. If he was believed at all. He had no way of proving that he wasn't just another trained clown, there to entertain the masses and make his trainer very rich. When Helen Keller, wealthy and human as she was, finally spoke, the world had been excited to listen.

Harry would be at the mercy of the masses. It would be a flip of the coin, a game of chicken. Who would want to be the first to be believe in God's Deer? Harry could be a venerated prophet or a dismissed Cassandra and his inability to speak would make him unable to influence the outcome.

And how he was even supposed to get that kind of attention in the first place? The Dursleys would not want to help him, they abhorred all things abnormal, and Harry was painfully aware that he would very literally be considered fair game if he tried to escape the suburbia. The symmetry of Christ giving his body in communion and Harry becoming steak was not worth dying over.

The resistance he would meet on every step towards becoming God's prophet was overwhelming. Perhaps he was going about it all wrong.

Perhaps God was testing him.

But how could he possibly pass, when all he could perceive to be in his might was eating grass? Was that his purpose, then, to carve a path of godliness for deer? (There was no way he was expected to improve the ways of men, they were not about to go back to their hunter-gatherer ways on the say-so of a deer. No way. He hoped). How could he preach, and how would they understand? What was there for him to condemn?

How does a deer act right by God?

(It occurred to him that he might be cursed, or blessed. His existence was suffering, and if life was anything approaching fair, then surely his plight was compensating for something. Perhaps something wonderful was in store. Or perhaps he had done something terrible, and this was his punishment.

Perhaps he was the Messiah, chosen to suffer so that others might live in peace. But he could not recall consenting to any such martyrdom.

Perhaps life was unfair.)

(At times, certainly as he got older, his recurring asylum fantasies would make him wonder if he wasn't a madman going mad even in the world he himself had created. Madception. Except, and this amused him more and more, he was mad either way and no one ever leaves Platon's cave anyway.)

His thoughts on God were like his thoughts on everything else in that they changed nothing at all. The years passed him by, and at one point he started wondering about his own lifespan. Didn't deer have lifespans of roughly seven years? He was roughly that age, if not older, yet he felt as spry and healthy as ever. Did that mean he was unique in that too? It was another reason to suspect divine intervention. Evolution does not simply dump freak sentient deer with alarming lifespans in suburbia.

His depressive ponderings took a decisive step into sheer depression on one particular day he'd been watching Dudley play. He realized then that even if he were to wake up human the next morning he would still not be one of them, would still not belong. He would be too messed up. You can only pretend to be a thing for so long before it becomes you, and a part of him had to be irrevocably deer by then.

And wasn't that a ridiculous thought, he thought grimly, watching his reflection on Vernon's car, wasn't that a sign of denial if nothing else… at least part deer, how about arguably a bit human.

(Maybe people (living things, that is to say) were puzzles, mosaics glued together with different bits and pieces… pigeon, lion, human for some, or are humans so wholly human and their mosaic so even, that their pieces are merely cruel, youthful, mad?

It occurred to him that other people might not be fractured at all, that he might be the only one falling apart, mosaic so crudely glued together that you'll cut yourself if you touch it. It also occurred to him that his thoughts no longer made sense, even to himself.)

He did not feel sane.

And Dudley, Dudley the idiot, Dudley the unworthy little waste of space, Dudley who for whatever reason was blessed with a human form, Dudley playing with his friends, one of them, Dudley loved by his family - his family! Harry's deer heart was filled with as much hatred as blood, and it pulsed through him.

(A particularly devastating blow had been when he realized that, in spite of his three hundred and ten degree vision, his eyesight was in fact inferior to Dudley's, as the other boy could see a rich spectrum of colours and was able to tell when things were far away. It had been shocking. To him, vision had been shapes and shades and that had been that, but Petunia's cooing over her flowers and Dudley's fixation with screens had eventually made him realize that they had a gift he could not even imagine. The world held beauty he would never know, and fucking Dudley took it for granted)

He wanted to kick the boy in his face, make his head explode like a disgusting gooey watermelon. It would be beautiful, he would be killing his reflection, this unworthy human boy that had for some reason been granted the life Harry so craved. He would kill the Ego. (And be a real boy. Pinocchio had nothing on Harry's pain)

This never came to pass, nor for lack of will but because he was a four-foot tall deer with very skinny legs. He settled for daydreaming about it instead. This gave him a taste of happiness.

He sometimes thought about his creation. How had been conceived? Carried? Born? How had he come to live with the Dursleys? Even if he were right about God being his cause of existence it would not explain the how, the mechanics of things. The only ones who might be able to answer any of these questions were the Dursleys, but that was a bust. Butting one of them with his head was as far as he got before the headbutt victim sprayed lemon juice in his face.

His questions would remain unanswered.

(Something he did not want to contemplate, but that was likely true, was that even if someone one day gave him every answer he had ever wanted, and a purpose, he would still feel lost. His isolation was more than loneliness. It had become a part of him, like the feeling of sun on his fur or the desire to sleep when he was tired.

There was also the less psychological but even scarier option of them not having an answer. They were far from the kind of people that took in orphaned livestock, leading him to wonder if they had even chosen to. Which led to him wondering if the whole setting wasn't literally too bizarre to be true. Maybe he was correct in his asylum fantasy, or maybe God had created them as well, for whatever reason. Which might just mean that this reality only existed for his sake.

Perhaps Harry was God, and this reality was here to – what, exactly?

What was the purpose of this pantomime?)

Something occurred to him one summer.

He had made it through another winter and the grass was amazing now, but he could no longer find joy in even that. The grass would go away and like Sisyphus he would push that rock back up the hill, nothing ever accomplished, nothing ever changed. He felt foolish, having been seduced by summer in his younger years, having let grass and little flower delicacies dictate his priorities… he had let his animal part take over.

He felt ashamed.

(This in itself was not unusual: who among us wouldn't feel ashamed, knowing ourselves to be something so silly and primitive as a deer? Who wouldn't feel singled out, and run in circles trying to justify this joke of an existence?)

He did not know much about Christianity, but he knew that the wisest of the humans sought to distance themselves from their fleshly needs and shortcomings. They were ridiculed for this, but if he were a creature born of something beyond nature and beyond sense, what was there to do but to reject his flesh?

He could be a modern cynic. And ascetic, quietly dignified in his refusal to eat any more grass than he strictly needed. Or he could continue his life as he's living, but let his morose thoughts go, become a Epicurean of sorts. He did not need to go to school or work, he had not commitments other than eating grass. He could manhandle his mind into a happy place.

(And maybe that was the evolution of the species. Maybe all creatures but men had given up on their intelligence, choosing dumb simplicity for reasons he was starting to understand, and forgotten themselves.)

But then, what would there to tell him apart from any other deer? He could not stand to lose the one thing that gave him worth. And neither school of thought would change anything. He might eat a bit less grass: but then, he did not eat much as it was. The sole difference was that he would be directing his own mind. He would compel himself to think in predetermined venues, but for what? A sense of belonging? Of purpose?

His choices made no difference to anyone, himself included. His life truly was pointless.

Like any other depressed mammal, Harry had his good days and his bad days. Slowly, as his mind made him unable to take joy in the joys in his life and brighter thoughts lost their resonance, the bad came to outnumber the good. On the worst days he would be too overcome by the tragedy of his own existence to even leave the shade.

The worst days came to outnumber the bad: for what was the point in eating grass, when the purpose of that would be to prolong the existence he so hated?

And here came the final steps of a dark path few but still too many find themselves upon, for Harry did at last realize he was suicidal.

Had he had something to look forward to, or even to dread, a change of even the slightest kind, a world of difference would have been made. He did not. And how could he claim to loathe his life, if he chose to cling to it? He would become a knowing hypocrite, stewed in self-loathing. How could he wish for autonomy when his thoughts did not affect the sole action he could take? How could he claim integrity?

And there was one practical question that he had always avoided, but now allowed to the front of his mind. If he did not age normally, how old might he get? Might he live for years and years, even decades, until his body failed him one last time? Could he bear to?

Did he have a reason to?

Harry's decision to kill himself was the realization that he could.

It was a defiance of his nature, of his fate, of life itself. He spat God in the face: he no longer cared whether he had only now perceived His plan or if this decision was him failing that divine test. For the first time in his life, he felt relief. It was light, and careless, and unfolded itself from his heavy sorrowful heart, blowing all the bad and painful darkness he'd been carrying away like smoke.

He was euphoric.

(And if his one remaining fiction was that he chose his suicide method for its irony, rather than it being one of the very few suicide methods available to deer living in suburbia, then he did for once choose not to overthink it.)

He jumped the Dursleys' fence that morning, fresh and graceful, a maiden in white running into her lover's embrace, and ran into the road. A Peugeot rammed into him, and he died instantly.

By noon, he had been scraped off the pavement and sent to a nearby landfill, and a letter addressed to _Mr. Potter, The Garden, 4 Privet Drive, Surrey, England,_ had been picked up by a surprised Dudley.


	2. More of Harry's Ponderings

**A/N:** Before you start reading this, know that this was never meant to be written. Harry's tragic suicide in the previous chapter is how his story was supposed to end, so take a moment to regret his sorry fate. Fortunately or unfortunately however, somebody made me an offer I could not refuse, and so Harry lives to have more depressing adventures.

* * *

Harry woke.

For one blissful moment, the implications of that simple fact did not dawn upon him. He was awake, as living things are for the entirety of their remembered lives.

Then it hit him.

He sprang up on his legs, and looked around himself.

He was standing on a hill of garbage. Above him the sky was clear and he could feel a sweet breeze, but that only made the dying things around him hot and even smellier than they otherwise would have been. There was no point in wondering whether this was the afterlife or not, as only worldly filth could ever produce such ugliness. He was definitely alive.

Dear god, he was alive.

And not just that. His legs were fine, he discovered. There were disgusting things smeared all over them, and his fur was a stained sticky mess, but he was fine. That car had rammed into his left side and he must have been thrown under it, and yet here he was, perfectly uninjured, wide awake, _alive_ , in the middle of what appeared to be a landfill.

He felt no different than he had before, so he doubted he was a zombie. No, he was alive… or as alive as he had before. It dawned on him that he might be something far, far freakier than a sentient deer.

A long, despairing squawk made its way out of his throat.

He had to get out of there. He wasn't sure if he was at risk of being incinerated, he knew very little about landfills in general, and considering his circumstance he wasn't sure if being incinerated would really be a problem, but he had to get himself someplace calm so that he could think, so that he could figure things out.

And so, he very slowly started walking down from the garbage hill he had woken up on. It was uneven ground, to say the least. Empty boxes, plastic and spikey things, a chicken breast that had to have been thrown out because it had gotten bad, now a vaguely discoloured repulsive thing stinking in the sun -

He threw up.

(It says something about the oppressive black stench of the place that even Harry's hypersensitive nose couldn't sense the vomit.)

The twenty minutes it took to carefully stake out a path down to the world of living were beyond awful, as well as dangerous. One false step, and he might have broken a leg or cut himself. And yet, somehow, these were not the worst moments of his life. Somehow, the looming danger and the simple task of getting himself someplace safe felt… pleasant. He was so used to being heaved down by misery, by wondering what or why he was, that the simplicity of navigating a landfill was more to him than a new experience. It was a new concept.

He really needed to think.

Jumping the fence was easy, but when his legs at last made contact with solid cement he did not move. He simply stood, looking at the scene before him.

There were a few buildings that he assumed to be administrative scattered around the lot. They looked neglected. He wondered if anybody would care if the trash sea ever rose beyond its fence-ordained limits and swallowed them. Or even notice. Amidst them, a snake of a road carved out a path for garbage trucks to follow. He could hear the roar of engines, and even faint voices.

(It was an ugly and godforsaken place, yet he couldn't help but feel a sort of kinship with it. The filth of the world, awakened in filth… a place with no other purpose than to accept humanity's rejects, a homage to entropy. His eyes filled with tears, and it wasn't just because of the stench.)

No-one had spotted him yet. This was fortunate, because he wanted to get the hell out of there, before anyone could disturb him. Whatever he might truly be he looked just like what was commonly considered to be a delicacy, and this was no time to put the charity of strangers to the test.

So he ran.

Beyond the landfill, stretched out before him, the road he was on joined another, greater snake. That road was pretty much it as far as distinctive landmarks went, for everything else was fields. Fields and fields and fields of crops. Or grass. It was hard to tell. He was on the countryside.

Ironic, that his attempt to kill himself had led him to what looked just like a herbivore's Heaven. The landfill might even have been meant to be a type of garbage Purgatory.

And yet he doubted that this was the work of Provision.

Harry did not much care for the God of the old Testament, the one who would reach out with his divine hand and bless this man, curse the other, and meddle in neighbour quarrels. He was mundane. Humans had an entirely too human understanding of God, they wanted to see themselves in him. Harry wanted the divine. He wanted a God who was sentient omnipotence, a God who had weaved reality and scattered life across the universe like he had stars on the sky, a God who cared little for right or wrong and that did not hear your prayers. There was peace in that idea.

But Harry was not sure where it would put him.

He wanted God to be undiscriminating because then his torment would simply be a strange twist of fate, a thread on the divine weave that had gotten jammed in the wrong place. A God that operated on a level Harry could not grasp was impossible to hate. Unfortunately, he had created Harry, and then brought him back to life. Clearly there was some purpose he was meant to fulfil, some business he had left unfinished. God was not as neutral as Harry wanted him to be, and he would not be allowed to rest until he had accomplished whatever it was he was supposed to do.

The alternative was that God had nothing to do with this. That would absolve Harry of his divine purpose, and he would be free to make of his existence whatever he wanted. But if there was no outside influence then it was Harry who was special, Harry who had sentience and Harry who for whatever reason had risen from the dead… no. He did not want to think in such terms, and he justified this to himself with his own bastardised Pascal's Wager. For if God was real and Harry put his faith in him, then he would succeed in his life. If God was false, however, then Harry would have made a mistake and could deal with that later.

Going the religious route was really the only reasonable thing to do at this point.

And so he set out to follow God's Will as best as he could, which he figured had to be related to the Dursleys somehow. If God was real, then Harry had to have been placed with them for a reason.

The Dursleys were important somehow.

* * *

It took him all of three days to make his way back to Privet Drive. (Not because it was that far, but because he had struggled to find the right suburb. The number of them was appalling. Was this the fruit of human society?)

They were not happy to see him.

It couldn't be because of his appearance, because he had stumbled upon a lake and enjoyed the first bath of his life two days earlier. He was in fact cleaner than when he had left.

No, they were genuinely upset that he was back in good health. He would have been offended if he had expected anything at all from them beforehand. It was perhaps fortunate that he could not bring himself to care about their petty protests and Vernon's pitiful attempts to shoo him, not when he had died and come back again. He gave the man the coldest look he could muster, a look filled with all the contempt he held not only for the man himself, but for what he, fat and dim as he was, represented. He even bared his teeth, ever so slightly.

Vernon shut his mouth and stared, gobsmacked. Harry would have smirked at him if he could as he passed.

"Petunia…" he heard Vernon say behind him. Never mind the smirk, Harry wanted to _laugh_.

The garden had not been disturbed since he had left, so settling back into his grazing habit was the easiest thing in the world. Somehow, though, it felt different. _He_ felt different.

His attempt to kill himself had failed, but it was an issue he was going to tackle. Even if he turned out to be wrong about God, he would still have a purpose. He was scared of it, of course, but coming back from the dead and the subsequent journey back home had revolutionized his world view. He was no longer the sheltered little madman lamenting in a sixteen square meter garden. He had grown. He had tangible proof that he was extraordinary.

He had bested death, and felt rather good about it.

* * *

A few days went by as Harry got to know his new and improved confident self, before he turned to figuring out his purpose. He decided to have some fun and be logical, piecing together God's will like Sherlock Holmes looking through clues to find a murderer.

He felt secure in guessing that he was not waiting to have some epiphany. God would have placed him in a meadow if it were so. No, it had to be related to his interactions with the outside world: why else place him in the midst of humans? Putting him in suburbia was nothing if not a sign that he was to interact with mankind.

The only question was what sort of interaction God had in mind.

Suburbia carry with them the stench of materialism, of aspiring middle class flocking together to fight for primitive goals like who has the nicer car and whose treacle tart recipe is the most savoury. Harry, as a profoundly philosophical deer, was the opposite of all that. It would not be unreasonable to presume that he was to lead the masses to salvation.

It was, in fact, the most reasonable explanation he could think of.

And yet it felt distinctly wrong. The idea of being a prophet felt- wasteful. And God had others. God had had Jesus preaching self-improvement. A variety of religions, philosophies and even political ideas had encouraged the liberation of self from earthly constraints throughout history and they had all, in turn, been trumped by human avarice. Greed, rooted in primitive self-preservation, will always win through, and so Harry could not perceive the quest to create an essentially communist utopia to be anything other than futile.

Why, then, would God want Harry join in this doomed endeavour? Harry found the idea of God caring about humanity's life choices to be naive, but assuming that the Almighty was human enough to love and patient enough to still be helping humanity help themselves, then the creation of a clever Lazarus deer would be a very inefficient way of accomplishing that. But assuming that God for whatever ineffable reason wanted Harry to be his new prophet, then he ought to have let him _know_. The Bible was full of exciting tales of how this and that holy man was chosen, or rather, how he had been informed that he had been chosen, and Jesus, the holiest of them all and God's very own son, appeared to have known all along.

(It could be argued that even Jesus was not quite as extraordinary as Harry. All of his miracles had been done with a blessing, by channelling the power of God: Peter proves this when he too walks upon water, and in the Old Testament there is even Elisha waking a child from the dead. Their miracles were truly those of God. Harry's were his own.)

Harry had no such innate knowledge, and angels had yet to descend from the skies to inform him of the will of God. It made no sense for Harry to have some kind grand reformist purpose. In fact, looking back at what the clues he had been given, it appeared that God had made him ignorant, but also given him the intellect to figure out why.

Which is why he turned towards the Dursleys.

At first glance, they were the most ordinary lot of middle class idiots anyone ever saw. Harry would not deny that he hated them for a lot of different reasons, but one of the big ones would be that they were so disgustingly, _pathetically_ ordinary. They actively sought dullness, and Harry was only now realising just how extraordinary that was.

Somehow, in their small-mindedness, the Dursleys had transcended the human drive to diverge from their peers and make themselves memorable, and they had never looked back. (For a brief moment, Harry wondered if this divine experiment wasn't somehow about them, if a sentient, possibly immortal pet deer wasn't God's idea of a practical joke.)

And this is where Harry came to a stop.

What exactly was he supposed to _do_ about the Dursleys?

His head fell towards the ground, and not because he wanted to eat grass.

(Though he did chew off a tuft now that he was in the area.)

And never mind God's effing ineffable will, what was it that Harry wanted out of life? This new him might be confident, and in a way he had surfaced from the madness and depression that had once consumed him, but he was not happy. He would even go so far as to say he was no less unhappy-

He shut those thoughts down almost immediately. _No_ , he thought to himself, _do not go down that road_. It had claimed his life once before, and while there was a good chance that he would just come right back if he died again, his cheating of death was one miracle he did not want to know more about, not yet, no matter how integral it was to uncovering the truth about himself. He was not ready.

He was very much ignoring the elephant in his brain in not wanting to examine his deeper feelings on having to live. A lifetime of misery had left its imprint, it was like a sea. Just because he had been pulled onto land did not mean that he could not fall, or get pushed back in. The euphoria he had felt when he liberated himself had been lost to him ever since he woke up, and he did not want to look into whether anything could ever be worth that loss or no.

He was back to being his own prisoner.

He stood in the sun that day, not letting himself think about anything other than grass, avoiding the shadows.

* * *

Dudley came by the next day.

He stood there for a few seconds, simply staring. Harry stared back.

"We keep getting letters," Dudley informed him after a few seconds.

This was unprecedented.

All of the Dursleys, Dudley included, had always avoided Harry as well as they could. True, Dudley had had a phase when he put firecrackers in Harry's garden, but other than that he had been quite certain that his interest in them was entirely one-sided.

Apparently not.

He walked closer to Dudley, hoping to encourage what had, sad as that was, already become one of the greatest social events of his life.

It appeared to work, because Dudley continued. "Mum 'n Dad are pretty pissed," he said.

Harry was fascinated.

Not only was Dudley talking to him, but he had just uttered opposition to the other Dursleys. He had distinguished himself from them. And in words, no less, Harry had always perceived Dudley as being dim and violent, but if the boy could differentiate between himself and his parents, if he was capable of breaking out of the not-so-indivisible unit that was his family, if he could rebel… Perhaps this was God's sign.

Harry trotted around the boy and bopped his butt with his nose to see how the boy would react.

He yelped. "Don't be gay," he said, and Harry barked in the closest thing he had to laughter. _Dudley_ was asking _him_ not to be merry?

Dudley appeared to be slightly alarmed. "Uh, mate-" he said, before he corrected himself, "Hairy- um." He got no further.

Harry, on the other hand, had gotten very far.

Dudley had come into his garden as an independent being, and he had tried to connect with Harry. He did not realise yet, but the hand he had stretched out had been taken (latched on to) and Harry was starting to see the logic and symmetry of God's plan. He went to stand in front of Dudley, and tried to look like a friend. Dudley just stared at him, as if seeing him with new eyes.

Well, that feeling was mutual.

The boy patted Harry awkwardly on his forehead, and Harry would have soiled himself with fear at having his blind zone suddenly invaded if he hadn't been having such a profound divine revelation. "I'll just… go. Then. Dumb deer," Dudley said, before following through on his words.

And Harry could only bark, again, because Dudley was right. Harry was a very dumb deer.

God had placed the intelligent and artistic Harry with that destructive beast Dudley, and Harry realised now that this was symmetry. In the past he had wondered why he had no family, but now he knew that Dudley was the youth, the new generation, the witless savage that he, Harry, was to educate.

He heard the front door slam shut. For once, this was no symbolic exclusion. For once, he did not feel rejected.

If anything, it felt more like Dudley was attempting to protect himself from the intellectual revolution he was about to be treated to.

Harry had plans for him.

* * *

When the sun rose the next morning, Harry was waiting on the front porch.

He had a plan.

Dudley would have to come out sometime, and he was going to intercept him.

And lo and behold, at around nine he opened the door to pick up the mail. For whatever reason, the letter opening on the door seemed to be nailed shut.

Harry squawked at him. Quietly, so his parents wouldn't hear. They were co-conspirators now.

Dudley was not yet versed in the arts of subtlety, and exclaimed "Hairy!" quite loudly.

Harry shook his head at him.

Dudley whitened. "Hairy?" he said again, and this time his voice was barely above a whisper.

Oh Lord, this was it. Harry was finally being acknowledged, and it was because he was doing as God had wanted. There could be no mistaking this. He was on the right path.

He nodded, wishing he could smile.

Dudley stepped closer. Harry was oddly reminded of Persephone. Well, if eating Harry's fruit of knowledge could make him unable to return to his moron ways, then he was all for it. (And Petunia _would_ do everything in her power to get her son back, but no plea could sway this deer)

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" the boy said, tentatively, and already Harry could see his good influence in the boy, for his watery blue eyes were alight with curiosity. Perhaps even awe.

Harry nodded.

"Blimey," Dudley breathed, looking ready to faint. He looked down at the letters he had picked up and up again at Harry.

"What the devil is going out there?" Vernon called. Dudley and Harry both jumped. (Of course they did. They were opposing sides of the same coin)

The dawn of a new age, Harry wanted to tell him.

The age of God.


	3. Harry's Gethsemane

Dudley snuck out to see him after breakfast.

Harry was ready.

He had spent the night before scavenging Vernon's garage, gathering both tools and concrete plans. Dudley was apparently his purpose, and he believed he had figured out what that meant.

He was not meant to be the boy's friend, or even brother. Not yet. Dudley had muscles and a voices and Harry had not, and for all his newfound love for what he now knew to be his brother, Harry very much considered Dudley to be immature. To say the least. Merely spending together with play and getting to know one another would inevitably end up with Dudley dominating him, and from there was a short road to him becoming the boy's shiny new toy. A trained dog to show off until he grew tired.

Harry felt sick just thinking about it.

He was not so deluded as to believe He gave one whit about his life satisfaction and dignity, but His grand plan had to be about more than getting Dudley a pet. Harry simply had to follow the clues he had been given to figure out its exact form, and a way around what he suspected to be Dudley's desired outcome.

(There was, of course, the possibility that he was Job reborn, only God didn't even want to test his faith, he just wanted to watch and laugh. Perhaps he was a God of chaos.

Perhaps Harry was very wrong in giving God his piety. Perhaps God was not God at all, perhaps the heathens had had it right with their mad superhumans. Perhaps Divinity was not beautiful but a bunch of hooligan using humans for their perverted games. Perhaps Harry was a joke.)

And for once, the answer came to him with relative ease. It seemed to him that they were both cursed in a sense, Harry with his form and Dudley with his mind. He did not know what exactly had caused Dudley's astonishing idiocy, be it a natural inclination or his parents systematically suppressing his every human thought, but it seemed to him to be as miserable a life as his own.

Dudley, for all his material goods, expressed only superficial glee at toys and food, and it never seemed to last longer than the first few moments of «Another bike? Wow, dad, thanks!». Harry doubted he knew true happiness, or that he was even aware enough to recognise that he didn't. His lacked ambition and curiosity, as proven by his decision to surround himself with equally dumb children.

Harry suspected they were each other's negative: human where the other was not, and with just enough otherness to attract the other. He wasn't quite flexible enough to kick himself, but would have if he could for not realising this sooner. This symmetry was no accident.

Together they could be the pinnacle of human form and human intellect. Their partnership would make them the best versions of themselves, with Dudley as a man of sophistication and grace, and Harry with a vessel through which he would finally be able to communicate with the rest of the world. He was not so vain as to believe they would be perfect, only God knows perfection, but they would in the simple act of improving themselves according to God have reached a far greater level of ascension than most ever did.

(Or, Harry had had to consider, they would, after a decade of not knowing one another and being lost in the darkness of their respective curses, struggle and fight with tooth and claw to become as good as they knew how, become no more than equal to the humans around them. Like amputees they would devote themselves to learning how to walk without a leg and find that everyone else had always been walking with perfect ease.

What would their journey count for then?)

He would, in short, have to educate Dudley.

Dudley had, in recognising Harry as a fellow man, proven that he had potential. He believed in the impossible, in that which the world around told him could never be, because his senses told him otherwise. This attitude gave Harry hope.

Dudley was a seed ready to bloom, and he needed the water of Harry's love and knowledge to break free of the dirt suffocating him and see that they were God's creations.

It was with this in mind that Harry had snuck into Vernon's garage, and spent the night pulling anything he deemed useful into the garden. He would see Dudley bloom, and he would do it using actual gardening tools.

Presently the boy stood before him, looking dismayed.

«What is this mess?» he asked.

It was an early Saturday morning, so Petunia and Vernon wouldn't be discovering the theft of several shovels, a rake, a watering can and a pick-axe Vernon had for whatever reason had hanging on his wall anytime soon. So he ignored the question, and bowed at the boy instead.

Dudley stared at him.

Harry inclined his head forwards, looking at him intently. If this worked, much would be accomplished already.

«Huh?» the boy pondered.

Harry repeated the gesture, deeper this time. Comprehension and surprise dawned on Dudley's chubby face. This was not what he had been expecting.

«You want me to- seriously?»

Harry nodded.

Dudley produced a slightly stilted bow in return, looking unhappy.

No matter: this was proof he could learn. Harry was delighted, but too disciplined to show it. Instead, he locked eyes with him when he was done and gave him an approving nod. It was the best reward he could offer, given the circumstances.

He then trotted over the pick-axe and knocked it lightly with his hoof.

Dudley didn't follow, both literally and figuratively.

Harry barked at him. Gently, so as not to alienate him.

«You want me to get that for you?»

Harry nodded.

Still looking befuddled, come to think of it that expression had been on his face when he came and never left, Dudley walked over and picked it up. «Now what?»

Harry gave him an affectionate bump on the hip: he couldn't resist.

Then he traced a diagonal line on the lawn before them.

«You want me to dig that with this thing?»

Harry nodded.

Dudley shook his head. «No way, mum's going to be mad.»

How could he be worrying about his mother's surface impressions in such a moment? He had so far to go. Harry barked at him and drew that same line again, though there was little agitation in his movements. Jesus didn't run after the children with water pistols. He would let Dudley come to him.

Dudley looked torn.

Harry drew the line again, squawking softly.

Somehow, miraculously, by the will of God to prove he was on the right track, it worked. Dudley drew a very shallow, but visible line of dirt in the grass. Harry gave him another affectionate bump, and was thrilled to receive a hesitant hand on his shoulder in turn.

It was the first time anyone had ever touched him in kindness.

Oh, but if he had loved Dudley as a brother before, then this was the moment where he fell _in_ love. Not the romantic or sexual kind, that did not occur to him, but a transcending love in its purest form. The moment lasted but a second, yet Harry could feel a fundamental shift in his heart, in his very soul. Where hatred had once poisoned his every thought regarding the boy he now felt joy, actual genuine joy, for he had found someone to cherish. He knew love.

(For the first time in his existence he even loved God, for He was the One who had enabled all of this. He had created Harry and Dursley and put them together, and let them wait all these years so as to make this development all the more ecstatic. Harry could not find it in him to fault Him for anything.)

How could he ever have wanted to end his existence when the world held so much beauty?

Best of all was the knowledge that he would soon be able to express this to Dudley, and Dudley would understand.

He drew another line in the ground, parallel to the one Dudley had just made for him.

Huffing, Dudley carved that one too into the grass.

Harry then made two more lines, one connecting the two from the lower end on the left to the upper end on the right, and a parallel to that one again, this one sprung from the lower end of the line on the right side.

«It's a W,» said Dudley.

Harry nodded eagerly at him.

«What - _how can you read_?»

Harry ignored that, although Dudley asking such questions was promising. The boy would be great, if only Harry could wash away the filth of his ignorance.

When he moved on to gesture two straight parallel lines with a shorter horizontal line connecting them, Dudley no longer hesitated in carving them into the ground. His marks were not shallow anymore: he dug properly, if not very straight. Harry wondered if the shovel might be better.

No matter.

He moved on to the last letter, a shorter straight line with two diagonal ones forking out from the top. Dudley carved it dutifully. Harry's stomach clenched.

«What d'you want me to spell now?» Dudley asked when Harry didn't make any more gestures.

Harry answered by nodding at what had already been written.

 **W H Y**

Frowning, Dudley read it aloud. Harry looked at him expectantly.

Dudley looked at him.

A few seconds went by.

«Is that it?» he finally asked.

Harry was confused. His tuft of a tail, which he hadn't even realised was wagging, stilled.

How could such a simple question and its infuriating omnipresence in reality and existence not entice Dudley? What was he doing wrong?

True, the boy would have to learn to think… but he was not going to learn so long as he expected fun and games, which Harry was realistic enough to know that remained his core motivation. He remained covered in the dirt of his upbringing and had probably expected Harry to teach him swears from the animal kingdom. Harry had been getting ahead of himself.

It wasn't as if Harry himself had had an epiphany straight away. He had spent years and years wasting away inside his own mind before he grasped the contours of God's design. How could he expect Dudley to catch on immediately? The boy needed time and peace to think on his own, but that wasn't going to happen if Harry was there, distracting him.

There was really only one way to proceed, he realised.

He gave him a gentle, encouraging bump, limited in communication but not in affection as he was.

Then he turned tail and ran.

* * *

He spent the day galloping around, wondering how Dudley was doing.

He did not want to get carried away, but all the same, the boy had been watered for the first time in his life. No, scratch that. The boy had been given all the fertilizer he would ever need, and needed now only to find out which direction he was supposed to grow in. He had to look at that word, at «WHY», and ask himself precisely that. No matter what question he asked and what answer he came up with, he would be asking, he would be thinking, and the time when he looked up to the skies and saw that same question as he had been made to write in the dirt was nigh.

Dudley was Platon's man in his cave, and Harry had given him a mirror. He needed only use it to see the light of day behind him, and see that he had chains that had to break. He would see that watering can, and recognise that it, like his teacher, was there to nourish, and give life.

It would be natural.

(Briefly, Harry wondered how he would proceed from here with his training. Hadn't he just given Dudley the only lesson the boy would ever need, that he could possibly give? He wanted to leave it at that, but Dudley might need his support still.

Should he spell out **G O D** out before him, or let him figure it out on his own?)

* * *

He returned in the evening, when the sun was setting.

He was delighted to see that Dudley was still in the garden, or had perhaps come back. Either way, he was there. As were the tools Harry had dragged outside, and a few toys. He'd wager Petunia, having seen her precious Duddykins frolicking outside, had given him them so that he wouldn't grow bored. Ignorant woman.

He was happy to find the toys looked untouched.

Dudley was sitting on the ground in front of the Question, bent slightly forward. Harry thought of Rodin's _Penseur,_ even if Dudley's silhouette wasn't as still. His arms were moving. Perhaps he was gesturing for himself, trying with wavy movements to pin down the difficulty, the vague mess that was existence… Harry couldn't fault him this bewilderment. He stood still, regarding the boy.

He himself had in fear and ignorance tried to escape his duties, but Dudley could be shown the shortcut through all of that, the hope and purpose lighting his path. It was, of course, a concern that his passion might not be as clear as Harry's if he had not suffered as he had beforehand, but that could also be considered a blessing. Harry's hardships had molded him into what he was now become. Dudley, whose background could be considered to be the very opposite, would perhaps have ideas to challenge and complement Harry's own, rather than echo them.

Either way they would be unstoppable force. There was no way around it, for better and for worse. How could they be anything but?

He wished he was capable of smiling.

He became aware of a strange clopping sound. Slightly irregular, slightly more often than once per second. He hadn't thought much of it, but realised that it had been there for some time, in the background, and it came from Dudley.

What was he doing?

It was not a sound Harry could name, though he knew he had heard it before. It was a sound of nature, organic, not the racket of those noisy games Dudley had played in the past nor of neighbours mowing the lawn. It was a sound Dudley himself produced, with his own two hands. _Clop, clop, clop_. Its source was at the tip of his tongue, and yet Harry couldn't name it.

He approached the boy silently, so as not to disturb him. This was to be his first time seeing what happened when the boy was left to his own devices, his first glimpse into the world of Dudley Dursley. He was going to see the boy in his truest state. Excitement was a fire in his chest.

He walked up around the boy, and looked at the source of that mysterious clopping sound.

And though this was its very opposite, the deconstruction of his relief when he decided to kill himself, that moment still managed to feel familiar, for his heart stopped for a second, and when it beat again it was in a different rhythm. Everything shifted, and he would never be the same again.

Like when he had woken up in the landfill he did not even think or feel anything at first. He just stood there, looking, in that one long moment before the implications of what he was seeing washed over him.

Dudley was knocking two rocks together.

 _Clop, clop, clop._

There was little variation, only the occasional falter as he failed to keep up with his own rhythm. _Clop, clop, clop._ His watery blue eyes held a queer little light, enchanted as he was with the activity.

It was a light Harry had hoped to ignite in him.

The clopping continued, and Harry heard how hollow it was. Two soulless objects, knocked together by what he now recognised as another soulless object. The ultimate primitive act.

There sat Dudley, tens of millennia behind the rest of humankind, probably about to scream for his mother in surprise and delight the second sparks flew from his handiwork. If he could even manage that. There sat Dudley, having been offered Harry's friendship, having been offered greatness, and he did not even realise he was rejecting it all.

Harry felt his heart break. He could no longer feel his legs beneath him, and toppled to the ground. As though he had been shot: and hadn't he, really? By Dudley, his savage hunter?

The clopping stopped as Dudley looked up. «Hey, Hairy! Are we going to finish that question, or what?»

Harry could only stare at him as years and years of misery There truly was no purpose to anything. To him.

Was there no God, then? Or, if God existed but had not given him a purpose, what did that make Him? Was he really just a sadistic megalomaniac, making Jobs all the time, Jobs that would never be spoken of, never be prayed for? Harry and Job and only God, literally, knows who else, the one unfortunate chosen ones who only ever did right, but suffered anyway so that He and the Devil might be entertained. Or was the suffering the purpose? Was Harry atoning for something, someone, even though the Messiah's sacrifice was supposed to have covered all? Except he hadn't covered all, Harry realised. _Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house._ Had God changed his mind, then, was he making Harry cover for those who did not believe? Would every man, woman and child who died walk freely into Paradise because of Harry's sacrifice?

How could he fault God for that? Was he really so selfish that he valued his own personal happiness and his own ability to consent above the redemption of mankind? Could he not find all the joy he needed in the knowledge that thanks to him, all souls would be saved? But wasn't the point of Jesus that he was born a man, and that he chose everything? He chose to spread the word of God and love, and when the time came, he chose to die. Harry had not chosen anything. How could his sacrifice be a sacrifice, or even that, if he did not choose it?

It looked more and more like God simply did not exist.

The idea made him want to be sick, to weep, but neither would allow him refuge from the horror that was this life. Nothing would. If God did not exist then he was truly damned, and he had always been. Mercy would not be out of the question. Nothing and no one would be able to save him, and he would only have been fooling himself in thinking himself capable of happiness.

He could not stand it.

The one solid argument in favour of God's existence was that he had caught Dudley knocking rocks together. It could be a sign – but it could also be a coincidence. He should perhaps start believing in those. He should perhaps harden himself. Was this what it was like when children stopped believing in fairies?

Dudley pouted petulantly, and threw a rock towards him. It was a gentle move, it hit the grass a few inches from Harry and bounced off twice, but that did not ease Harry's resigned disappointment. Was this how the boy communicated?

«Are we just going to sit here, or what?» How had Harry not heard the simplicity in his voice, the way it held no deeper resonance, nothing beyond surface impulse? How had he not seen that Dudley was indeed his contrast, his idiotic counterpart, his caricature? That where Harry was always thinking and evolving, Dudley was a brute and nothing more?

He had been shown, time and time again, but he had thrown those signs aside in favour of hysteric optimism. He had ignored common sense, perhaps the most human thing of all, to feel better. Well, now he felt terrible.

The love and joy he had until so recently felt slipped away like water, and familiar anger and hate came to take its place. Some of it was directed at Dudley, he could not help it, but some was owed to himself, to God – hell, to reality. And he shame.

Before, he had not been at fault for his own circumstance, at least not that he was aware of. His suffering had been pure. Now, he had let a moron into his heart, into his mind… he felt corrupted. And stupid. His embarrassment at being a deer paled in comparison to this gut-wrenching feeling of betrayal. He had betrayed himself, and Dudley too had betrayed him, even if he did not realise it.

He would not let this happen again.

He got up. Dudley did too, hopeful and dumb that he was, but Harry turned his back on him and walked onto the street. He had no business with the Dursleys any longer.

He had no business with anyone.

Did it matter?

Did he matter?

He looked up at the skies for an answer.

And he found one.

God's existence was no longer certain, but he had one way of investigating the matter. One way of maybe seeing Him, and if not, then still learning something about himself. It scared him, and not because he feared dying (how could he when he was again without purpose? Without joy?), but because if he came back, and kept coming back, and never saw God, then he would be on his own. Forever.

It was terrifying.

But the time was come to find out if he could die.


	4. Deathless

He wandered for days.

It was not for lack of purpose. He was going to kill himself, and anyone can die anytime and anywhere.

He did not fear leaving this mortal plane. His body had only ever caused him torment and Dudley had rejected him, making it clear to the deer that while the world might smile upon some souls, such as the wretched Dudley, others would forever be cast in shadow, slotted in to form rows and rows of an army of the damned. Yes, that was one of the ways he saw life now: if God was real, and decided who would be blessed and who would have to earn every scrap of affection and respect they could get, then the Jobs of the universe were indeed as faceless and disposable as soldiers in an army.

But there were other ways to see life.

Death was his chance for deliverance, he had fallen just a little bit in love with it already (and wasn't that a great loud warning bell? Had he not given his love once already, and had that not cost him his will to live?), and amidst his many conflicting thoughts and emotions a tiny spark of hope dared to burn somewhere deep within, for he had the fledgling hope that maybe, just maybe, death might grant him his happy ending.

Whatever that might be.

And yet, paradoxically, the more he thought about it, the more he dreaded death.

When he had first killed himself he had made what at the time had been the very logical assumption that death would mean dying. The existence of an afterlife had been irrelevant, for he had wanted first and foremost to escape, and both oblivion and an afterlife would grant him that. He would not even have minded hell. Now, unfortunately, he knew that it might not be so. He might get resurrected again, never given the chance to open his eyes and look upon God, and then where would he be?

How could he possibly be saved?

It was in times such as these that he wished he had been born in the wild, for even if he had still had his intellect, he might still have known companionship. He would have had a mother, and even if she did not understand him she would still be his designated guardian figure, his mentor figure. He would have had someone to go to.

(Why, oh why had he been assigned to the Dursleys? It could not be random, yet there seemed to be no point to it at all. Perhaps that was the point?)

And so he wandered, pondering, as his mind became clouded with uncertainty and doubts, until one morning he found himself on a meadow. It was lovely: the early rays of sunshine shone gently on the lingering mist, giving it an otherworldly appearance, and yet it was nothing out of the ordinary, for the forest was full of meadows, the sun always shone pale in the morning and there was mist after every night. He was aware of and appreciated its radiance, but with each passing day he appreciated these beautiful sights less.

Still, he let his gaze glide across that meadow, not for interest but in a bid to stall, to fill five seconds of his existence, to take the briefest of breaks from his troubles - and then he found himself looking straight into another pair of eyes.

There, just beyond where the tree line began, sat a huntsman. He had been almost perfectly hidden, but Harry had seen him, and now his eyes widened.

For a few seconds, there was no telling which one of the two was tenser. Harry was safe at the moment, for a tall rock stood between them at an angle that shielded him beautifully. The hunter did not look to be sure quite what to think: he had probably expected Harry to run the second they made eye contact, but now that Harry was standing so very still, simply looking at him, he likely believed his prey was trying to ascertain whether there was any danger or not. His best shot (in every sense of the term) would be when Harry finally moved, if he was quick enough.

The man was hardly breathing, and yet he slowly, ever so slowly, turned the mouth of his rifle so that it was pointed straight at Harry, whose limbs were burning with the instinctual desire to run.

And yet… wasn't this the chance he had been waiting for? The second he was dead, that hunter would burst forth like a beggar to a dime on the ground to gut him. Surviving death itself might be one thing, but this hunter might abuse his body too much for life ever to return to it. This hunter could be his best chance of dying, and it would happen someplace infinitely more beautiful than any asphalted highway could ever hope to be.

The huntsman was a godsend, come to grant Harry's truest desire.

And there is only one way to repay such courtesy.

He stepped out from behind the stone, and then the world disappeared before he even heard the gunshot.

* * *

Harry woke.

For a moment, that was all there was to it. Like with his previous resurrection he had one moment of pure awareness, one moment of simply existing. Perhaps this was the moment his brain kicked into gear: perhaps the sights around him did not register as separate objects because his brain had yet to compose itself enough to inform his conscious mind of what it was seeing. Or perhaps he was in shock.

Either way he sprang up the very next movement, as the truth of his situation dawned upon him. His worst fears had been confirmed.

He, Harry the too-clever deer, was immortal.

His killer screamed and ran for the door. Harry realised that they were inside a shed, and that he stood upon a table made slippery with blood. His blood.

Pieces of his fur lay in strips on the floor – so he was not to be a pelt, then. Otherwise, flesh lay neatly arranged on one side of the table. It appeared his killer was quite methodical: a hunter by habit. Harry doubted he would be hunting much more after this, however.

He wondered if his killer would try to tell anyone about what had happened, and if anyone would believe it. That was unlikely. Had Harry, in his eagerness to die, ruined the life of another, then? The man would have a terrible choice to make when it came to dealing with what had just happened, and Harry felt a most unexpected bout of kinship. Their situations might be vastly different, but they had both had their lives ruined by knowledge they were never meant to have, by unnatural things.

He stepped out of the shed, and looked at the man whose hands were shaking too badly to unlock the door to his car. He bowed his head in a repentant, unseen acknowledgement of the pain he had caused: this had never been his intention.

Then, quiet as only a sixty-pound animal can be, he stole away into the forest.

* * *

He resumed his wandering. (What else could he do?)

Immortality loomed over him, but not as heavily as it should. He could not quite get himself to believe that this was truly his lot in life: surely, he wondered in spite of himself, there had to be something more to existence? Surely there had to be something he was missing, some vital piece of information that would make everything make sense?

In the face of eternity he found himself regressing. He became childlike and stupid in his unwillingness to face the harsh truth of his fate, and that in turn made him feel strangely bloated, as though the clarity of his mind had become clouded with fat, cloying sentiment. He could not help himself, for it was basic self-preservation: never before had he stood quite so plainly upon the precipice of the madness and greatness once thought reserved for gods and heroes, and he found it to be too much.

How could anyone with human thoughts and human desires, with a mundane form requiring constant maintenance and vigilance to survive and to not be in pain, possibly endure eternity?

He closed his eyes, as if that would make this chasm that lay before him go away.

He tried to reason with himself. Was accepting what appeared to be his own nature really the way to go? He did not see what that could possibly bring him, but then, he did not see what else there was to do, considering how meaningless his life was, and how indubitable his immortality seemed. Still, though, accepting it would mean resigning himself to an eternity of nothing, and he owed it to himself to at least try to deduce his way to some other conclusion, to some better truth.

It wasn't as though he wouldn't have eternity if his failed.

And so, under the guise of being thorough, he started walking down the dark path of denial, and he began it with a question.

What, exactly, was he losing in acknowledging his fate?

His humanity, his mind answered him readily.

That might not be such a bad thing. His existence was not a happy one, but centuries and an attitude change might change that. Perhaps his unhappiness, which he had thought was rooted in his form as a deer, was instead rooted in some innate knowledge that he was- whatever he was. Perhaps he would have been just as lost as a human.

But then, what was the point of being a deer?

And here something struck him, for there was no reason there should be a sentient, immortal and in all ways impossible deer. Would it not be more logical, then, to assume he was in fact _not_ a deer?

He lay very still, not daring to move for fear of letting the idea (or the escape) slip away.

What, exactly, constitutes a deer? What, for that matter, constitutes a human?

It was like a coup d'état, this moment. He had had epiphanies before, so he knew the feeling of them well, this feeling of everything shifting just slightly to make for a new way of seeing the world.

He was not a deer, and reality was not what he thought it was.

If it could be twisted so to allow him his existence – or if God had twisted it, for that matter – what did any of it mean? … come to think of it, this all but proved God's existence. There must be intent for such a thing to happen. Unless there were a lot more twists (he had no better word for it) such as him running about. How would he know? Could it even be a regular occurrence? The world he had seen from the Dursleys' garden was only on its shallowest plane, and it could even be the exception that proved the rule. He wondered if he, now that he was free of them might be able to find these twists, other unnatural things. Was there a physical place he could go? Logic told him no, although he had not seen much of the world. And he had only the words of others to prove that what he thought he knew was indeed so: what, exactly, had he actually been seeing with his own eyes? The Dursleys' belief that he was a normal deer was proof in itself that we make false assumptions unthinkingly.

He looked at the tree before him. Was it really a tree, or could it be sentient like he? Had it spent its entire life in this exact spot, from the day a seed found itself burrowing into the earth, or had it simply popped into existence one day? Had it existed prior to Harry's visit? If Dudley were to look at it too, would he see the exact same tree?

And yet he did not think the world was simple enough to allow him to simply walk into another plane of reality, or dimension, or wherever he was headed where he would be happy. He did not know the way, for one thing, but greater still was the problem that he couldn't quite sell himself on the idea that the world was somehow a fey land where those who walked far enough would wander into alternate realities. His existence was a bit too tangible for that to feel truly possible.

There was also the problem of an alternate reality where he was not a deer necessitated that he did not have a material form, which would make physically walking there very hard to put into real life.

The more he thought about it, the more it became clear to him that there was only one way he could be sure to leave this plane of reality, and it was the only way he wanted. His goal was to free himself from his deer form, and was not death the separation of soul and body? Would not that unlock his true self's potential someplace it would be appreciated?

Unfortunately, this great new idea had one logical breach: his whole predicament was that he _couldn't_ die.

Or could he?

What was his immortality but bouncing straight back into his deer form like a jo-jo? Was it, assuming now that his form was a unique twist in reality that shouldn't be, possible that humans, whose forms were the default hosts for souls, were interchangeable, meaning that death for them was simply a change of body? Were they like a toddler's wooden shape sorting game, in that every human form was a square and there were billions of squares but Harry was the sole triangle, leaving his triangle soul with no place to go but back into its old slot?

Could this mean that he was alone in being impossible after all?

That could explain the time lapse between the time he died and the time he woke up.

And yet, it raised the question of why his soul was a triangle, why he should not only return to the same host, but wake up with all his memories intact too. This went beyond being unable to possess any host but his own: this was unkillability. _What was he?_

Perhaps he did not have a soul.

Perhaps this form was the only place in which he could exist. Or if he was in some other way tied intrinsically to his form, and for this reason unable to leave it, and reality… and there it was, that feeling of dread. Could it really be that he was damned to spend all of eternity stuck as a deer? …. damnit. His mind was like a boomerang, spinning far away towards the sky only to come crashing straight down to the wretched ground from whence it came. He tried to trace his thoughts back to where they had taken a turn, so to say, so that he might change direction and continue flying.

For if he was not a deer, and if this dimension was not the only one, then that did not necessarily mean that his soul was spending hours flitting about trying to escape only to return with its figurative tail between its legs and resigning itself to another while in his unworthy form each time he died. At this point it was as possible as anything else, but he did not want to believe the implications of it, and so he found this theory more and more ludicrous. He divorced himself from it.

It was dumb anyway.

No, his best clues were that he was unlikely to be an actual grass-eating deer, and that he spent his sweet time being dead before resurrecting. He was losing faith in the world's ability to make sense – why should it when he himself did not make any? – but he was not about to abandon reason and deduction. That way lay madness. No, _he would be logical about this_.

The leaves and the grass around him tasted sweet, the unseen wind ruffled his hairs and a constant pull kept him and everything else grounded to the world. This was a world of sensations, of matter, and in it he was a deer. Whatever he truly was had to be beyond it. And in death the interval between his last and first heartbeat had to be when he was not in this world. In death he existed on another dimension.

This was a fact. It was the only thing that made sense. Or so he really hoped.

(Sense and deduction had led him straight into the Dudley Disaster. He should be careful- but careful is for the afraid, for craven beings that would gladly spend their lives waiting to be reaped like corn)

Why, then, could he not remember it?

Were these dimensions somehow incompatible, forcing him to block out any memory he might have of another? If so, did he exist in the other dimension in a state of confusion, knowing nothing of his earthly life and deer form? Were thoughts and impressions from the other dimension so fundamentally alien that they could not be translated to something his brain could comprehend when he wasn't there?

This might actually make sense. Thoughts are electricity, and Harry doubted electricity existed in this other world, this world of souls. Perhaps thoughts, then, did not exist at all, not as we know them. But this was quickly getting depressing again, for his thoughts were the very thing that made him intelligent, that made him a not-deer.

(He wondered briefly if he, by that logic, would be a deer in death.)

There was, he realized, only one way to find out for sure. Reason and deduction was only going to get him so far: if he wanted to know what lay beyond death, he needed to die again.

And this time he would be strategic about it.

* * *

After trotting in what he hoped was a straight line for a surprisingly long time, he finally found a lake that looked deep enough.

His previous two deaths had been sudden and at the hands of others, even if he did consent to them. (Not that they had. That Peugeot driver he could only assume had had no intention of ramming down any sentient deer when he got into his car to drive to wherever that morning, and the huntsman had not known what he was getting involved in. Harry had been so consumed by his own thoughts and feelings that he never once stopped to think about others, and now he had no way of making it up to them. This he regretted.) He had been full of life in one second, dead the other, and violently so.

He wasn't sure that dying a slow, natural death was really the key to accessing – or remembering – this other reality, but it was worth a shot.

And so he wandered, then swam, into the lake, until he couldn't, and drowned.

* * *

Harry woke, but didn't make it back to the surface and drowned again.

* * *

It took him a full six attempts to get back to the shore, for deer legs are thin, hooves do little to propel a body forwards and his anatomy did not allow for dogpaddling. His _on_ terment might still have been more due to the current than his abilities as a swimmer, however.

But that mattered little.

He felt cold, colder even than the water still covering him. Algae and dirt had gotten into his fur, but it somehow felt appropriate, as if marking him as an undead creature. No deer can go to bottom of a lake and live to tell the tale, after all. He would be a paradox to any who saw him.

Not that he was likely to run into anyone sentient this deep into the woods.

Not that it would matter.

Harry had drowned, several times now, and each time had been slow enough for him to feel death as a physical thing, as a numbness that consumed his body and was excruciating at the same time. He had felt every second of dying, and he had felt it again and again.

And still he had seen nothing but mud and the distorted rays of unreachable sunlight. There could be no more denying.

Harry the deer was, unmistakably and irrevocably, deathless.

He could no more die than he could reach the end of the rainbow.

Stumbling, unseeing, he walked forwards, but with no destination in mind. Where could he possibly go? He had no end. How could he have a beginning, or a between? His life was without purpose.

He found himself unable to care about anything. What could possibly be the point, when he was damned anyway? God, other realities, it all lay beyond him, stuck as he was on this cruel mortal coil. He had no will to even try and summon the anger of the slighted, for that, too, would fade in time, never having amounted to anything.

What can you do, what can you think and what can you even feel when you are not just eternal but eternally nothing?

An eternal human could exhaust the world's amusements and depravities, he could observe mankind's development, start a religion, have children and do social experiments on them for generations, do every drug in existence, and when he had had enough he could board a spaceship and see if he couldn't reach the end of the Universe. He could do anything.

Harry could eat grass.

These were the thoughts he had been trying to avoid, for they were too terrifying. In acknowledging his immortality and all of its implications, he relinquished his ability to live. How could he possibly take joy in anything now?

He was not ready for any of this. He doubted anyone could ever be, but it felt just a little bit harder for him.

He stopped walking, and sank into the ground. If he would lose interest in mortal pursuits soon enough, why not now? Succumbing then and there would not spare him his gruesome fate, but he would save himself from living a farce. His hopes, his deaths and the whole Dudley misadventure had been embarrassments enough as it was.

The only thing that came close to immortality in terms of filling him with bitterness was the knowledge that his every thought and every pursuit had, in the end, been in vain.

Strength faded from his limbs like smoke, and his head dumped unceremoniously down as if by its own accord. He could not think of a reason to raise it, so he let it lie there in the moss, unmoving.

There he lay, powerless, hopeless, thoughtless, miserable on the forest floor that should have been his grave. And he would gladly have done so for as long as the ground beneath him persevered, but the sound of a loud crack, followed by approaching footsteps, willed otherwise.

* * *

 **A/N:** You, my much cherished readers and reviewers (I have no idea why anyone would put up with this nonsense but am glad some apparently do), have no idea how close I came to ending it here. In the end, wanting to torture Harry some more won out, but... yes. This is the story that, unlike Harry's existence, keeps trying to end itself.


End file.
